Wheelchairs and other mobility devices increase independence for individuals with disabilities. However, wheelchairs do not provide storage for personal belongings. Individuals using wheelchairs as part of their every-day lives often have unique needs when carrying personal belongings and other items. For example, the typical student will often carry his or her books in a backpack when going to and from school. These packs are generally a convenient method for transporting books, but a wheelchair user may find certain aspects of a backpack inconvenient or undesirable for their needs. For instance, during transport the backpack must be placed on the chair in a position that would be secure, such as the rear of the chair. Unfortunately, the secure position may make it extremely difficult to retrieve books and other personal effects from the securely attached pack. Consequently, what is needed is a device that would allow a disabled individual to secure a storage device to a chair for transport while allowing the individual convenient access to the contents of the pack when desired.
The need for storage on wheelchairs and other mobility devices has been recognized for years. However, the articles designed to satisfy this need tend to be bulky, take up large amounts of room while deploying from a stored state to an assessable state, or drastically and adversely affect the stability of the wheelchair or the ability to clear ingress and egress points. Further, some storage devices are not readily accessible by the individual with a disability. For example, Shirk (U.S. Pat. No. 4,861,059) provides for a vertically pivoting box behind the wheelchair. The apparatus clamps to the wheelchair, with the storage unit pivoting on rods mounted to the base of the storage unit. However, the box does not rotate to a position where the wheelchair user may freely access the box.
Kekler (U.S. Pat. No. 4,919,443) and Letechipia (U.S. Pat. No. 5,180,181) both describe a storage box or bag that rotates horizontally on an axis mounted to one edge of the storage box or bag, and rotates from behind the wheelchair to a position above the armrest. Likewise, Roberts, et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,299,824) describes a tray that horizontally rotates from the back of the wheelchair to the front, on its axis. More recently, a focus on backpack storage and retrieval solutions has prompted devices designed to hold a backpack, stored behind the wheelchair and deployed horizontally beside the wheelchair's armrest, as evidenced by Perez, et al. (NSF 2001), Chanchavac, et al. (Proc. Of the IEEE), and Matthew (US Pub. No. 2005/0001405). However, these new designs still rely on pivoting the storage unit, here a backpack, around a fixed axis. The bag rotates around on a boom from the rear of the wheelchair to the side, allowing the wheelchair user access. Thus, the new designs still require large areas to deploy, limiting the usefulness of these products. Further, because these designs transfer the backpack through a large arc, to reach the side of the wheelchair, the wheelchair becomes increasingly unstable as the backpack reaches the apex of this arc. Moreover, these designs are not compatible across wheelchair manufacturers.
The current invention provides a way to store belongings behind the wheelchair, and to access the storage without requiring a large space to deploy the storage and retrieval product. When the user wishes to access his or her belongings, the bag slides from behind the wheelchair to the side of the chair, allowing the user access to the contents of the storage device. Previous designs pivot, taking up the full length of the retrieval product, as the product swings around on its axis.
Therefore, what is needed is a device that does not rely on a rotating motion to retrieve the storage device, thereby taking up substantially less space during retrieval and reducing the instability inherent during deployment.